It’s amazing what kind of computer you can get for a few hundred dollars; and a laptop at that! But yes I do believe dual core is worth it, laptop or desktop. My laptop with a Core 2 Duo 2ghz runs SO much smoother and locks up so much less often than my work computer, a Pentium 4 at 3ghz. I mean, of course part of it is that 2x2ghz is 4ghz, which is > 3ghz (yes I know it does not map linearly like that) and also that the Core 2 Duo is much more efficient than the Pentium line, but still. (And no my work computer does not have spyware or anything; although, come to think of it, it is running McAfee AV so that doesn’t really help the cause…) Sometimes I just wish I could use my laptop at work, because my job would be quite a bit less frustrating if Outlook didn’t take ages to open up, or Visual Studio didn’t take several minutes to compile my tiny apps…

But as far as five hours of battery life, I would say there’s a good chance with that extra expansion bay battery. Without the extra battery, the computer probably gets close to 4. My Inspiron E1705 (a 17″ monster with a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900GS video card) gets almost 3 hours of battery life max (that’s if I’m in power saver mode with the screen a couple notches down in brightness and not doing anything to max out the processors), so I would definitely believe a 15″ gets better than that, and then the extra battery should be a clear boost and it will probably push you over the 5 hour mark depending on what you’re doing.

Keep up the good blog! :)